A woman wearing a niqab in Paris before France outlawed such coverings. Photograph: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

In 1630, a certain oatmeal maker was examined by the highest church court in England, accused of preaching without a licence. Before an audience of bishops, he kept his hat firmly on his head. Doffing it momentarily to a secular representative, he turned again to the bishops, crying: "But as ye are rags of the Beast, lo! – I put it on again." Refusal to observe "hat honour" – the custom of removing one's headgear in the presence of a social superior – was a way of saying, in the most confrontational manner: "I reject your authority." (In the case of the oatmeal maker, this was an especially radical rejection: the bishops were agents of Antichrist.) It was a gender-specific affront, since hat-doffing was a peculiarly masculine form of humiliation.

Hat dishonour and burqa-wearing are not, of course, the same thing at all. But they do both illustrate the symbolic power of head-covering, and its relationship to political "headship". Twenty years or so after the case of the oatmeal maker, following civil war and the collapse of traditional pillars of social stability (the monarchy, and the church courts), the early Quakers also famously rejected hat honour. This was a prophetic sign not only that unjust inequalities were being dissolved, but that men were subject to the authority of God alone. Keeping one's head covered was a provocative statement of dissent towards the entire system of deference and consent which apparently held together English society.

The Quaker leader George Fox later recalled: "O! The blows, punchings, beatings and imprisonments that we underwent, for not putting off our hats to men! Some had their hats violently plucked off and thrown away, so that they quite lost them." Many male Quakers were indeed imprisoned for this crime; the main offence among Quaker women was their tendency to interrupt ministers in the pulpit, and hold forth to a generally unappreciative audience.

It's difficult not to take sides with the Quakers. They emerge as heroes of liberal modernity, championing social equality and victimised by a repressive regime. But what now seems merely the flouting of rather a silly convention must have resonated powerfully with their contemporaries. Looked at from another perspective, the noble Quakers could be (and were) branded dangerous religious fanatics. After all, a monarch and an archbishop of Canterbury had been beheaded. Property rights were being questioned. Apocalyptic revolutionaries were plotting to take over the world. In this climate, the Quaker gesture meant more than the wearing of a hat: it signified the rejection of the head itself, the seat of authority and order.

By criminalising the wearing of the burqa, the French government has shifted the debate around Muslim head-covering from important questions about female sexuality and equality to a much more volatile confrontation between sacred and secular authority. Muslim women do not always necessarily don the niqab for purely religious reasons. But this legislation has politicised the act, so that no woman in France can now cover her face – as a gesture of piety (seeking identification, perhaps, with the wives of the Prophet) or anything else – without also defying the political establishment. Banning the burqa formalises the antagonism between the Islamic world and the secular west.

And yet, being placed in this position of defiance may lead to unexpected and not wholly destructive outcomes. (On the defensive, Quaker apologists developed some of the most innovative arguments for religious toleration, for sexual equality, and for pacifism; though this is not, of course, a rationale for persecution.) Perhaps it's not entirely to be regretted that pious women are appropriating the discourse of human rights, and engaging in a confrontation with paternalistic authorities that claim to know what is best for them.

The burqa-clad woman, masked but for a slit revealing mysterious eyes, has become almost fetishised in the west as an emblem of sexual oppression and the sinister facelessness of Islamism. There's no knowing what impact the French burqa ban will have on inter-cultural relations, but it is to be hoped that it may, paradoxically, create a space for those women's voices to be heard. For better or for worse, like the Quaker radicals, they can now use the language of gesture to voice their dissent.